Drug Information Services in Nepal: An Overview, Present Scenario and Future Perspective

Introduction Drug Information Centre (DIC) provides services regarding several aspects of drug information, to healthcare professionals and consumers, that are impartial, updated, well-referenced, and critically evaluated.1 This information required ranges from therapeutic information for the treatment of patient, comparision of efficacy, potency and costs, market availability to even recent advances in drugs.2 Drug information is a speciality area within the realm of clinical and hospital pharmacy services and drug information specialists have clinical knowledge and skills that allow them to provide clear, concise, and accurate recommendations regarding drug use.3 Pharmacists or clinical pharmacists or other trained health workers provide drug information service or medicine information services to enhance rational prescribing, improve medication safety by reducing medication error and increase medication adherence.1 Need for Drug Information In developing countries like Nepal, where most of the general population belongs to the low-income category, with multiple health care systems and a lack of reliable information about the risks and benefits of drug therapy, a system for authentic, unbiased and evidence-based drug information could explicitly contribute to information needs of the people.1 In the past, there were limited number of available drugs, but now, newer drugs and multiple treatment combinations are being introduced for effective and efficient treatment and control of various diseases. Doctors get information, especially about newer drugs from medical representatives who are generally biased towards their product.4 Hence lack of accurate drug information service poses a problem and affects the pharmacotherapeutic process. Furthermore, over 20,000 biomedical journals are available worldwide and more than 6,000 journals are published every day.4 This means literature review itself becomes time-consuming for doctors to keep themselves well informed with the latest drug information. Hence it is challenging for health care professionals to keep themselves up-to-date by extracting unbiased information with available resources. On the other hand, patients often are interested to know about drug availability, its side effects and drug interactions if under multiple medications.